A long stay in Essaouira

Next stop is some summer sun on the beach at Essaouira and a Norfolk reunion with Pete, who has flown out to see me between Christmas and new year.

So after a quick catch up on news, we get our priorities sorted and look for a place to show the Liverpool v Man City game. We end up in this back street bar watching the game and get speaking to a Senegalese guy called Adam. We buy him a couple of drinks as we hear about Senegal and how he is in Morocco as a musician. Through broken franglais, a couple of small beers and an hour of time it seems Adam is now our lifelong friend.  After then buying him dinner and seeing where he lives and quite firmly refusing to tell him where we are staying, we still can't decide if he is really friendly, scrounging, or a bit dodgy. After seeing him play a terrible rendition of 'jamming' by Bob Marley we decide he is mixture of the first 2 options. So harmless, but we can see that if he sees us we will not lose him for the whole day.  So for the next 3 days in Essaouira we play this ridiculous game where we pick our routes to wander based on if we can see (or are likely to see) Adam.

I also learnt from Pete the way to deal with persistent shop owners trying to sell you stuff is to just say "je suis russe". Most of the shop owners speak Arabic, Berber, French, English, Spanish and German...but not Russian. However Pete's pasty skin allows him to pass for Russian, but for me they all just speak to me in Spanish.
 
Finally I need to apologise to Pete as the last couple of days I was a bit rubbish having got a mild mixture of heat stroke, manflu and dodgy stomach. I finally left the picturesque but tiny town 6 days after I arrived! I never want to suffer the nervousness that is a cold / dodgy stomach mixture. Every sneeze felt like a risk!Read more